Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Loki Ingest

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company building observability software used by millions. The Databases team owns telemetry databases (Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Pyroscope for profiles) that are open source and provided as Cloud and on-premise services. These systems are implemented in Go and run on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). The role is remote (applicants from USA time zones only).

Responsibilities

• Influence roadmap and career objectives; drive technical direction for components you own
• Work with your team to deliver new features and iterate based on results
• Drive projects from ideation through production and operations
• Contribute to open-source projects across team boundaries
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems; own reliability, performance, and availability
• Participate in on-call rotations and own the services you run
• Mentor and support other team members; participate in design discussions and collaboration
• Learn and deepen understanding of a large distributed system and the cloud product

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Grafana Labs uses Go; familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar translates well)
• Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, design, shipping to customers
• Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering
• Some experience running complex distributed systems at scale
• Experience writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in a fully remote team

Bonus (Nice-to-have)

• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience running Kafka at scale
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
• Familiarity with on-call/operations/SRE tasks or infrastructure-as-code concepts

Compensation & Rewards

• United States base compensation range: USD 168,256 - USD 201,907 (actual compensation may vary by level, experience, and skillset)
• Roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), potential bonus, and other benefits

About Grafana Labs / Why You’ll Thrive

• Remote-first, global culture with transparent communication and empowered teams
• Built on open-source roots; focus on meaningful, innovative work
• Emphasis on career growth, approachable leadership, and work-life balance (30 days annual leave, company shutdown days)

Equal Opportunity & Recruitment

• Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and may utilize AI tools to assist the recruitment process. Recruitment team will review CVs manually.